


City Girl, Country Girl

by Lassarina



Series: 2017 Sev and Rina Prompt Extravaganza [11]
Category: Persona 4
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 22:59:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11323488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassarina/pseuds/Lassarina
Summary: Rise reflects as she leaves Tokyo for Inaba.





	City Girl, Country Girl

Rise's shoulders finally start to relax an hour out of Tokyo.

She's still not even halfway to her grandmother's house in Inaba, but just the fact that Tokyo is falling away behind her as the train speeds to its destination means that she's that much farther from her agency, from having to generate buoyant enthusiasm for low-calorie drinks, from being anybody other than herself. Not like she knows who that is, but maybe she'll find her in Marukyu.

It's honestly really weird that no one in this Green Car seems to recognize her, or at least no one has come up to her to say hi. Rise saw another idol getting on at the same time she did, but he went straight to his seat and didn't talk to anyone, and no one tried to talk to him, so maybe that's just how it is. Rise hasn't ridden the train in ages, since the agency usually sends a car, but basically flouncing out of your contract over a minor breakdown (which is what she overheard one of the receptionists complaining she was doing, and maybe she wasn't wrong) means the agency doesn't fuss over you as much.

Going incognito helps, a little, but she still cringed when the attendant came to offer her a drink, even though nothing happened.

She hasn't been to her grandmother's since before she took the contract. She wonders if Inaba will seem tiny and boring after so much time in Tokyo. She kind of hopes so, at least for a while; she's so _tired._

Her phone chirps and she ignores it; her agent spent the entire three days before she left Tokyo trying to change her mind, and she doesn't have the energy to be Risette for him right now. For anyone right now.

They're getting out into the country now, and she finds herself mesmerized by the landscape as it rolls by. It's not that there's anything there that's new (relatively speaking; buildings and trees and cars are everywhere), but it's _there_ and it doesn't want anything from her, so she can just watch it blur.

She loses herself in that longer than she expected—maybe she fell asleep? She's not sure—and then the familiar landscape of Shiga Prefecture starts to show up. It's started to rain, and the drops cascade and smear across the window. When she was little, she hopped from puddle to puddle, making up her own dance moves and singing silly little songs. She loved rainy days in Inaba because her grandmother let her play in the rain.

She's too old for that now, but for a moment she thinks of the soft splash of puddles against her orange rain boots, the ones she wore until they fell apart, and she wishes she wasn't.

The train pulls into the station. Even though she said she could make it to Marukyu on her own, she knows her grandmother will be on the platform despite the way the rain will make her hips ache, because she said she would.

She leaves the other idol, and Risette, behind in the Green Car and steps onto the platform as just Rise, a country girl who still doesn't know who she is.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "pastoral."


End file.
